“La Lunga Scia di Sangue” – Photo Animation

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“La lunga scia di sangue” is a historic documentary about the the Second World War resistence in the cities of Collegno and Grugliasco near Turin. In the video produced by PrimissimoPiano, explicatives scenes are been added using the Photo Animation technique to replace a much expensive historic rappresentation. The Photo Animation can render more vivid and more alived the collected testimonies in the documentary; this is the end of the abused Slide-Show and the new way to show photographic element.

Starting from archive photos or digital pictures from web, the composition process is been subdivided in 4 phases:

1 – We created the layers through the Photoshop tools in which we have to realise the animation steps. After the cut of useful shape contour, it’s necessary to create the picture restore for the definition of a complete background.

2 – Importing the Photoshop file in After Effects, we can proceed to the spatialization of the created layers previously: every plane is turned into 3D and they are spaced on the Z axis. Now we introduce a Camera Layer to start the animation of the scene: like a director we have to visualise the change of postion and the pan/tilt movement of new point of view.

3 – To increase the realism of the scene, it’s been added element to the composition like smokes, explosions and shoots. The characters are been animated through the puppet tool (this is possible if it was allowed by the resolution and the definition shape), on the flags we used the wave alteration effect. To underline the foreground to the background it’s been connected a Blur Control.

4 – With the last step, the composition is been altered by the colorization of foreground shapes to increase the emphasis; to simulate the old film camera we added a textured filter.
The camera layer has a wiggle expression on his position and rotation parameters to generate a camera shake effect. This result is amplified by the export to 12fps.

The Photo Animation technique has a substantial flexibility: we realised a project about historic photos, but the illusion of 3D scenes is achievable for artwork, painted, and compositing picture. We can suppose a double perspective for this digital technique: the possibility to use the Photo Animation like an educational medium about the history, sciences, arts, but it will be a perfect way to project museum installations too; or we can consider him the birth of a new expressions world with an own poetics.

A perfect exemplary choice in the pictorial area is rappresented by this project created by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro. Here we can see like the digital artist reworked the art pictures adding depth to the image: the scene seems to be alive, the figures have a new energy, but the original artwork sense is intact.